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March 2016

The Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2016 is now over. If you blinked, you missed it. You shall now have to wait until 27-29th March 2017 for the next one, to be held at the Leeds Business School. I still think that this is one of the best networking conferences around and well worth attending, though for the purposes of full disclosure I have to admit that I have a dual role: as a peripheral organiser as well as a full workshop attendee. The workshop runs over two days and is followed by a hack day which I was unable to attend because of other commitments.

Does array index order affect performance?

A couple of weeks ago I was teaching an ARCHER Modern Fortran course, and one of the things we discuss during the course is index ordering for multi-dimension arrays. This course is an introduction to modern Fortran (primarily F90/F95), so we don't go into lots of details about parallel or performance programming, but as attendees are likely to be using Fortran for computational simulation it is important they understand which array dimensions are contiguous in memory so that they don't accidentally write code that is much slower than it should be.

Figure 1: Performance using the GNU compiler

During one of the practical sessions on the course, one of the students wrote a little program to investigate the performance impact of iterating through array elements in a non-contiguous order. They also included some code to investigate if there is a performance impact when using allocatable array rather than static arrays (I'd mentioned it shouldn't impact performance but I obviously wasn't convincing enough...).

This blog article comes from one of our current Phd students: Athina Frantzana, who is researching the obstacles facing women in the HPC community, and how equality can be improved.

The under-representation of women in STEM workforces has been a widely discussed subject in recent years. However, the recording and analysis of data regarding the gender balance of HPC remains rare.

Our study is a preliminary analysis of workforce and research participation in HPC, and aims to quantify the current level of representation of women in HPC and to provide a baseline for evaluating possible reasons and suggesting ways for future changes to the demographics.

EPCC staff have enthusiastically engaged with the ‘Love to Ride, Edinburgh’ cycling challenge. This is an effort to get more people to cycle within Edinburgh for environmental and health reasons through fun workplace competitions. Workplaces compete in a league based on the number of staff and EPCC is currently topping the departmental league (50-199 staff) .

Broadening participation in HPC: taking outreach to the next level

One of the reasons why EPCC set up Women in HPC is because we recognised there was a problem. The problem was the apparent lack of women in the supercomputing community. When my colleagues and I started Women in HPC, our purpose was very clear: to recruit and retain women in the international HPC workforce.